Tuesday, September 02, 2014

A Tale of Two Letters

Who would know better about the lies and fabrications of spies than people who used to be spies themselves? A group of ex-intelligence officials, called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has spoken out against Imperial madness for some time now. On August 30, they sent an open letter to German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, warning her about falsified claims of "Russian invasion". From the letter:

Obama, however, has only tenuous control over the policymakers in his administration – who, sadly, lack much sense of history, know little of war, and substitute anti-Russian invective for a policy.
[...]
Largely because of the growing prominence of, and apparent reliance on, intelligence we believe to be spurious, we think the possibility of hostilities escalating beyond the borders of Ukraine has increased significantly over the past several days.
[...]
Photos can be worth a thousand words; they can also deceive. We have considerable experience collecting, analyzing, and reporting on all kinds of satellite and other imagery, as well as other kinds of intelligence. Suffice it to say that the images released by NATO on Aug. 28 provide a very flimsy basis on which to charge Russia with invading Ukraine. Sadly, they bear a strong resemblance to the images shown by Colin Powell at the UN on Feb. 5, 2003, that, likewise, proved nothing.
[...]
the government army that was starting to take heavy casualties and lose ground, largely because of ineptitude and poor leadership. Ten days later, as they became encircled and/or retreated, a ready-made excuse for this was to be found in the “Russian invasion.” That is precisely when the fuzzy photos were released by NATO and reporters like the New York Times’ Michael Gordon were set loose to spread the word that “the Russians are coming.” (Michael Gordon was one of the most egregious propagandists promoting the war on Iraq.)

One doesn't have to be an intelligence professional, of course, to realize the timing of the "invasion" propaganda was conspicuously coincidental with Kiev's crushing defeat. In resorting to such transparent lies, the Empire and its mainstream media betray a belief that their citizenry are idiots.
Earlier this morning, I saw another open letter (h/t Mark Sleboda)- this time by the Atlantic Empire establishment and their Ukie clients - protesting a peace platform proposed by a group of U.S. and Russian scholars. The said platform amounts to too little, too late - but it's illustrative that even that is entirely unacceptable to the warmongers. Both the platform and the letter condemning it were published in The Atlantic.

There is just something grotesque in seeing U.S. policymakers protesting "Russian aggression" and talking about "internal matters of Ukraine," and concluding:

We should consign to the dustbin of history the days of “condominium” between Russia and the U.S. in deciding the fate of other independent countries.

Because, you see they don't really want countries to be free, independent and deciding for themselves - they want the all-powerful Atlantic Empire to decide everyone's fate alone.

On what do I base this conclusion? On some of the people who signed the letter, and their track record as U.S. and British policymakers. There's Strobe Talbott, Clinton's adviser on Russia and Eastern Europe; and two ex-ambassadors, Richard Kauzlarich (who "went native" in Bosnia in the 1990s) and Michael McFaul, who recently resigned his post in Moscow having failed to topple Putin in a "color revolution". Also undersigned are the neocon media-hitman Jamie Kirchick, professional Russia-hater Anders Aslund, and even the co-author of a Nazi-apologist screed in The New Republic, Maria Snegovaya. Of other names that popped out, there is Ian (son-of-Zbigniew) Brzezinski, Adrian Karatnycky (currently at Atlantic Council, previously at Freedom House), and the Banderist exile leader Paula J. Dobriansky. And those are just the names that jumped out at me...

So in effect, this confirms the VIPS diagnosis that the Imperial policy-making establishment has gone off the deep end. The louder these people scream "Russian aggression," the more obvious it's becoming they are trying only to cover up their own.